Tinkling on My Lanai

Despite temps in the low 80's and balmy breezes off the Gulf, despite my indolent lifestyle and occasional over-indulgence in just about everything, this Florida retirement gig is not all it's cracked up to be.  You should understand, for instance, that as I sit here on my new lanai, slaving over a hot keyboard, the vicious Florida sun is shining in my eyes.  Really, it's hard to make out the screen.  But I persevere, mostly as an exercise in persistence.

Here are a couple of Florida facts that will warm the toes of northerners who just got whacked with another half-foot of white and sparkly.  First off, my lanai is under a live oak tree.  No, not the opposite of dead oak, but a nasty species of oak that seemes eternally confounded by the fine weather.  Northern oaks know enough to shed their leaves in the fall with a thud, so you can rake them and haul them away in a single outing.  Maybe two.  Okay, red oaks, maybe a little cleanup in the spring.  Still, that's a civilized way to run a forest.

The flummoxed oak in what I jokingly refer to as my front yard tinkles leaves constantly, all year.  Or close enough.  They tinkle on my roof, the roof of my new lanai.  My lanai where I celebrate my indolence with a cold glass and keep sunglasses handy.  Tinkle.  Tinkle.

The roof of my lanai, like everything else on the property, is made of aluminum, except of course for the wide expanses of bathtub caulk that hold the place together.  If you have not heard oak leaves tinkling on aluminum, then you have no firm grip on the concept of annoyance.

To say nothing of acorn season, which lasts six months.  Acorns don't tinkle on aluminum.  They clang like Big Ben on Ritalin.  Do you know how many acorns fall from a good-sized live oak in heat?  I do.

The oak trees are not the only airborne threat to my peace.  My aluminum-clad lanai provides a runway for rutting squirrels taking off and landing.  Squirrels, like oak trees, are in rut all year long.  A bonding pair of half-pound squirrels hustling over aluminum can be deafening. Like living in a giant squirrel-powered snare drum.

My father-in-law down the street came back from the war (The Big One, W-W-I-I), with a small arsenal of portable weapons of localized destruction.  I know where he keeps them.  Push me hard enough, damn squirrels, and I might just start blazing away. 

So, Gentle Reader, before you move to Tampa Bay, mull over the cacophony you might face on your lanai.  Tinkling and clanging and snare-drumming, I must tell you, are crappy conductors of indolence.  And then there's the possibility of a rain of shell casings pinging off the roof.

Newt

Risen from the Ashes

OK, the bleeding has stopped, and I'm out of bathtub caulk.  Siding on the front porch (say "luh-NYE") is up, the wiring done.  OK, twice on that last:  I put a nail through a wire the first time and blew a fuse, but that was just one of those random things that even we experts sometimes encounter.  Furniture is purchased and placed.  Anticipating unprecedented public demand, I'll post pictures as soon as the artwork is done. (Betsi Burgess, where ARE you?)

So, what's wrong with this picture?  I can't even entertain on the lanai this week.  Why?  Because my 9-year-old granddaughter Katy insists on sleeping out there on an inflatable bed.  Sweet.

Newt

Where Were You When I Needed You?

Today's mail brought the glossy, 60-page Graduate Report published periodically by my favorite law school and alma mater.  My classmates are pictured running for governor and guiding major international corporations.  I am delighted to report that I, too, made the cut.

For 20-odd years I have waited with patience and humility for UConn to take note of my many legal triumphs.  I mean, I once wrote a riveting brief arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit the state from monopolizing the garbage industry.  Few cared.  Another time I engaged in extended one-on-one colloquy with the Chief Justice of the State of Connecticut trying to persuade her that the word "environmental" includes matters historical.  Did anyone notice?  Hell, no.  It's not my fault she didn't buy the argument.  Although I did get a nice footnote in the decision.

I thought someone would flag my ground-breaking interlocutory (deal with it: I'm taking to lawyers here) appeal to the Supreme Court that took unblushing advantage of the fact that the sitting Chief Justice and his second in command were both disqualified from the case at hand.  Nope.  Damn.

Okay, I'm being unnecessarily modest here, because I did once have a judge stop me in a courthouse hallway to tell me that the job I did on a trial was, in his words, "somewhat adequate."  I asked him to put that in writing, but he just wandered off.  You'll have to take my word for it.

So, as you see, I spent my legal career in genteel obscurity, pleasing a few unusually discerning clients and generally avoiding malpractice suits and disbarment and the like.  Eventually, professional stardom having eluded me, I bailed out of Connecticut for sunnier climes, here to pursue important matters -  my bridge game, driving aimlessly around the lovely countryside, and searching Tampa Bay for a decent glass of beer.  That sort of thing.  I have accomplished much in these endeavors, I might add.  

But wait, there's more!  Just when I thought I would live out my remaining days in blissful irrelevance,  there I am on page 50 of the latest Graduate Report, with name spelled correctly and all.  Right there in the same pages where an earlier graduate gets the library named after him and another becomes the chief legal bottle-washer at Wesleyan University.  Heady company indeed.

Which of my numerous achievements, you may ask, so grabbed the imagination of the university that it thrust me onto this illustrious stage?  How does one become famous enough to make the grade?  It's not easy, my friends.  I did it the hard way.  I am honored to accept the University of Connecticut's recognition of this crowning achievement.

No, really, THIS crowning achievement.  This blog, Eye of Newt.  No doubt, the editors of the estimable Graduate Report have concluded that I am unlikely to do anything more significant than this, so it's best perhaps to recognize me now and be done with it.  Anyway, Eye of Newt will live on in perpetuity, rules against such notwithstanding.  (Another crummy lawyer joke - sorry.)

Lesser persons would celebrate by booking passage to Disneyland, but I instead scrambled to make sure my old articles had no egregious spelling or grammatical errors.  I thought of deleting the trailer park articles and that unfortunate bit about the palmetto bug.  But, no, I am who I am, and my erstwhile peers will just have to take me the way I am.

In closing, I would like to take this opportunity to ask all who noticed me in the Graduate Report to send me a dollar or two.  If everyone did that, I could probably spruce up this blog a little.  Social Security really isn't what it's cracked up to be. 

Newt

On Becoming Illiterate

It was 77 degrees Fahrenheit here today, and I planned to make my family and friends in Connecticut (where it's about 7F) aware of that fact.  But then the tornado watch hit the national news, and I thought that might spoil the effect.

Still being a bit of a newby here, I scouted out convenient storm shelters and found none.  I thought maybe a basement somewhere, but this is Florida, the Land of No Basements.  That's because the water table lies only three inches below the surface.  Golfers complain because divots fill with water faster than they can be repaired, and sand traps have to be elevated.

I went to the library to find a book to read in the shelter, should I find a shelter, and discovered with some consternation that I am becoming illiterate.  I, who grew up reading the Hardy Boys and Lucky Starr & the Moons of Jupiter (written pseudonymously by Isaac Asimov), was unable to find a book I could read.

Admittedly, I only looked in the "new books" section, but I get to the library often enough that new books ought to be sufficient.  Except it wasn't.  For the first time in recorded memory, I came away empty-handed.  Bookless.  Illiterate in fact if not in theory.

The library's new books included hundreds of volumes, all involving vampires.  I found Blood Lies and The Vampire Rides at Midnight and Vampires Paint the Town Red.  I pulled a book promisingly titled The Betrayal, but it began, "She didn't recall when she began to hate werewolves."   (There may be some fine distinction between vampires and werewolves, but does it matter?)  A biography of Tom
Hanks begins with his death. 

I think the dearth of decent books is Ronald Reagan's fault.  When he told Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," he unwittingly destroyed an entire genre of Cold War thrillers.  (Some argue that he did a lot of things unwittingly.  Not to be confused with half-wittedly, which seems to describe recent presidential history.  Okay, enough of that.)

Anyway, as a result of some dubious unfettering of most of eastern Europe, thriller writers are lately consigned to writing the same book over and over.  To wit: Stuart Woods just wrote the 14th volume in the Stone Barrington series.  Fourteen!  Will & Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization required only eleven.  I like Woods, but I stopped reading somewhere around volume 6.  Tom Clancy wrote the classic Hunt for Red October and has since written nothing readable.  In fact, he now rents out his name to others who write drivel that would embarrass Danielle Steele.

I CAN'T READ THIS CRAP.

So I may as well be illiterate for all the good it does to drive to the library.  If I find a storm shelter before the big blow levels Tampa, I will have nothing to read.  Pity.

Newt

The Triumph of Uncle Bud

If you haven't been reading the past few posts, this will make little sense.  Serves you right.  Synopsis to date: in remodeling the lanai, I discovered a leak in the roof..  Preparing to install a patch, I learned that dear, departed Uncle Bud had slathered the area in question with bathtub caulk.  Uncle Bud slathered everything in B.C., probably including his breakfast toast.  A dear man, really.  So you shouldn't take my obscene outbursts too seriously.  I have done some genealogy in the past, so I know - in some intellectual sense - that Uncle Bud did indeed have a father.

I dynamited all the old caulk off and patched and applied a bit of  fresh caulking compound according to enlightened roofing protocol.  Blood flowed.

It rained yesterday,  The freaking roof still leaks, albeit not so aggressively.

So I climbed back up and slathered an entire tube of B.C. over the patch.  Screw it.

Bud, you were right.  Rest in vindicated peace.

Newt